Borat co-writer Dan Mazer and a comically adept cast including Ellie Kemper, Kenan Thompson and Rob Delaney, make for a diverting enough retread
The wildly unorthodox set-up of 1990
Christmas staple Home Alone – parents so consumed with making a flight on time that they would somehow leave their bloodthirsty eight-year-old son behind – was at odds with its shock success, a hit so big (its $476m gross would now be around $1bn with inflation) that a sequel was therefore inevitable rather than in any way logical. So Home Alone 2 soon followed, a film that imagined even more unforgivable parental negligence, and then somehow a franchise too, with three more overcalculated misadventures on top, the genuine festive sparkle of the original fading into dusk.
The prospect of yet another one, this time with some vague same universe ties to the first, has created more ire than these things usually do since the
trailer dropped last month, a sign of both the original’s enduring fandom and an increased fatigue with revisiting and repeating well-worn property. But dropping on Disney+ in time for its younger target audience to watch, rewatch and then watch again by the big day, Home Sweet Home Alone is a surprisingly entertaining, if wholly unnecessary, sequel, a tangerine where we expected to find a lump of coal.